Build weekend review 29th January 2017

Should’ve done this 2 weeks ago but sometimes life gets in the way… My microphone has bust so this is going to be a text blog.

Our build weekend, which started so promisingly, didn’t quite go as planned. To start with we didn’t have all of the bits we wanted (again!), so we’re looking at a couple of possible different suppliers for the future.

What did we do to Big Dave? Well we ironed out some problems from last time out, which means that Big Dave now runs a lot more smoothly. The remaining electrics have all arrived and been placed inside Big Dave too so all we needed to do was to attach the weapon and test it. This is going to be scary, one way or another. I mean, we have so many batteries, Big Dave moves really fast (even before with the previous issues we have had before, now its going to be even better)…

Big Dave 3 with weapon attached. Will it work?

…Then a little known thing called gravity, combined with her best buddy friction and Uncle Pivot, stopped us from moving. At all. It turns out a flaw in the design means that the weapon is just too heavy!! So back to the drawing board, where we either move the wheels to the front by putting the weapon on the back (which would ruin all our lovely interior design) or redesign the weapon. I’m personally gutted that at such a late stage of the build we have to make some changes to the weapon (as are the rest of ARC). At least we can come back from this and be ready to compete at either the Extreme or the main Robot Wars events!

On a positive note we are getting something of a fan base! On the last couple of build weekends we’ve had about half a dozen people visit us while working on Big Dave. It seems that no matter how young or old you are, you can always be fascinated by a big hitty thing. This is especially surprising given how isolated we are in our garage! We might as well be in Killiecrankie (and yes, this is a shout out to Pussycat!). To quote Craig Charles, “You can smell the cowpats in the great outdoors, it’s like the smell of fear, on Robot Wars!”